For more than a decade, marketing budgets moved in one direction: more targeting, more measurement, more performance. Every dollar had to trace back to a click, and every click to a conversion. It produced teams that are excellent at harvesting demand and less and less able to create it. Brand awareness, the layer whose job is to make a brand known to people who have never bought from it, quietly stopped being built. Rebuilding it is the problem most performance teams now face.
This piece covers why the awareness layer eroded, what it does that performance cannot, and how to rebuild it without swinging back to mass-market waste.
Nobody decided to stop building awareness
The erosion was not a decision. It was the sum of many rational choices, each one defensible on its own.
A retargeting campaign can be measured to two decimal places. A brand campaign, on last-click terms, cannot be measured at all. So budget flows to what can be defended in a finance review. Over years, that incentive compounds, and spend drifts to the bottom of the funnel:
- retargeting and remarketing;
- narrow audience segments built on past behaviour;
- conversion formats aimed at people who already visited, already bought, already know the brand.
The result is a marketing engine tuned for the people it has already reached. It is efficient the way fishing in a bucket is efficient: the hit rate is high, but the bucket does not refill. The green field, people who have never bought and do not yet know the brand, is the only real source of new growth. It goes untouched, because reaching it is expensive, low in frequency and hard to attribute.
What the awareness layer does
Awareness advertising builds mental availability at scale. It puts a brand in front of as many different people as possible, at low frequency, so that when they enter the market the brand is already familiar.
Broad-reach channels do this job: linear TV, connected TV, online video, lightly targeted social, out of home. They reach the people who are not in market today but will be next quarter or next year.
Performance does the opposite, and is meant to. It chases the small slice of people already showing intent, and harvests demand that already exists. The mistake is treating one as a substitute for the other.
Performance cannot replace it
Retargeting cannot create a customer who has never heard of you. It can only convert one who has. A brand that spends only on performance is living off awareness it built years ago, drawing down a balance it has stopped topping up.
The symptoms show up late:
- acquisition costs rise;
- the same spend returns less;
- the channels seem to have "stopped working".
They have not stopped working. The brand has run out of green field.
Rebalance, do not reverse
The answer is not to swing back to mass-market television and call it a strategy. Brands that over-spent on performance should not now over-spend on broadcast. The move is a deliberate rebalance, in 3 parts.
- Shift a share of budget to broad reach. Start with a test you can read, aimed at people who have never bought, not at the ones you already retarget.
- Cut waste at the bottom. Much narrow retargeting pays to reach people who would have converted anyway. Trimming it funds the awareness layer without new money.
- Change how success is measured. Stop judging only on last click or short-term return on ad spend. Track penetration, brand recall, share of voice and long-term revenue growth: what the awareness layer actually moves.
Over several years, the brands that win will test and scale creative and media built for new reach at low frequency, and use performance more precisely, to harvest the demand awareness creates. The two layers are not rivals. Performance without awareness is a harvest with nothing planted.
Where this lands in Southeast Asia
In Southeast Asia the imbalance is often sharper. The performance playbook arrived fast, and the measurement culture hardened around it early. Many regional brands never built a deliberate awareness layer: they went straight to performance and have been harvesting a thinning field since.
The opportunity is larger here for the same reason. Connected TV and online video are maturing across the region at the moment brands need an awareness layer that is measurable enough to survive a finance review. Brands that build it now will not be trapped when performance costs climb again. For how that buying works in practice, see direct, programmatic or agentic.
Where Oderra helps
Oderra does not measure brand lift. It makes the buying side of the awareness layer simpler: Skopa, the buying agent from Oderra, sends one awareness brief to the premium streaming and video publishers that match, and the trader confirms the plans that run. Fanera, the selling agent from Oderra, answers for each publisher at its own prices, and both sides read delivery against the confirmed plan in one shared record, so the reach you paid for is the reach you can show.